In Bruce Golden’s futuristic thriller Better Than Chocolate, Marilyn Monroe comes back to life -- in a manner of speaking.
She is a "celebudroid" -- an android created to look and act like Marilyn Monroe.
Oddly enough, she begins to grow as a person in this new incarnation, and ends up partnering with a San Francisco police inspector to save mankind from a vast conspiracy.
Oh, why not?
This book is the newest title on the mysteries set in the future list.
The most famous, of course, are the J. D. Robb books featuring Eve Dallas, a futuristic 21st century New York City police officer, who had her debut in 1995 in Naked in Death. The series has progressed through more than twenty titles, with a new title, Strangers in Death, due in February.
The series is set in late 2050s New York City. Other planets have been discovered and humans have built man-made worlds, some as vacation destinations and some as penal colonies. Androids are commonly used as servants and office workers.
Other recent books include Penny Deacon’s mysteries, which take place in a vague post-apocalypse setting on England’s waterways, where people live on decaying barges and kill for food and evil crime bosses rule.
Philip K. Dick’s classic 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis of the film
Blade Runner, is classified as science fiction yet actually qualifies as a mystery as well.
SciFi giant Alan Dean Foster’s The Mocking Program offers a blend of police procedural and science fiction, featuring a police inspector in a megalopolis that encompasses Mexico and part of what used to be the United States.
David Drury’s All the Gold of Ophir (2005) features a private investigator called in after several unexplained deaths on a space station orbiting Jupiter.
So, if you could have a celebudroid made to order, whom would you choose?